The mood of “Grace” is a primarily humorous and lighthearted one despite the emotionally heavy content. Kernan is struggling with a genuinely difficult situation—he has a binge-drinking problem that has led to personal and professional decline as well as an injury—and yet Joyce primarily focuses on a pleasant conversation he has with his friends and on the farcical Catholic sermon they listen to.
It is notable that Kernan’s friends—Power, Cunningham, and M’Coy—come over with to have an intervention for his drinking but end up dealing with it in a lighthearted way, as seen in the following passage:
There was a short silence. Mr Kernan waited to see whether he would be taken into his friends’ confidence. Then he asked:
—What’s in the wind?
—O, it’s nothing, said Mr Cunningham. It’s only a little matter that we’re arranging about for Thursday.
—The opera, is it? said Mr Kernan.
—No, no, said Mr Cunningham in an evasive tone, it’s just a little ... spiritual matter.
—O, said Mr Kernan.
There was silence again. Then Mr Power said, point blank:
—To tell you the truth, Tom, we’re going to make a retreat.
Here, Kernan poses the question, “What’s in the wind?” implying that he is aware that his friends are withholding something from him. Rather than shifting to a more serious mood, the conversation stays pleasant as his friends refer to their intervention as “nothing,” “only a little matter,” “a little spiritual matter,” and “a retreat.”
While many of Joyce’s stories in his collection Dubliners feature bleak and depressing moods, this story is a moment of reprieve. This is likely because Joyce is focused on highlighting the comical absurdity of Irish men avoiding heavy topics as well as, later in the story, the absurd ways that the Catholic Church lets needful people down.
