“Grace” is a modernist short story belonging to Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners. Modernist writers typically wrote stories that challenged literary conventions and centered alienated, unhappy, and low-income characters struggling to survive in the harsh conditions of the industrialized modern world.
Kernan—the protagonist of the story—certainly meets some of these conditions. Rather than overcoming obstacles and growing as a person—the way a protagonist in a traditional short story might—he starts the story in personal and professional crisis and ends in a similar state. (Though Kernan has taken the step of attending a Catholic retreat with the hopes of becoming sober, Joyce intentionally ends the narrative before the retreat is even fully underway.)
Joyce also refuses to give readers a clear moral takeaway—another component of modernist literature. There is not a single character who readers are necessarily “rooting” for—Kernan is an alcoholic who burdens his wife, his friends feign a deep knowledge of religion while getting many facts wrong, and Father Purdon waters Catholicism down to a business transaction between practitioners and priests.
With “Grace,” Joyce is also telling his own version of the biblical “fall of man” story. While Adam and Eve metaphorically “fell” from grace after eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge, Kernan starts the story literally falling down the stairs after getting drunk. While Kernan appears to have a chance at redemption at the end of the story in order to become sober, Joyce implies that it will not be so simple.
