The tone of “Two Gallants” is simultaneously both ironic and earnest. The title of the story alone suggests that Joyce is gently mocking his two main characters, whose comfort with objectifying and manipulating women proves that they are anything but gallant. At the same time, Joyce clearly sympathizes with these characters, presenting their moral failings as the result of Ireland’s decline in the face of British colonialism.
The beginning of the story is characterized by the ironic, playful tone, as seen in the following passage:
Two young men came down the hill of Rutland Square. One of them was just bringing a long monologue to a close. The other, who walked on the verge of the path and was at times obliged to step on to the road, owing to his companion’s rudeness, wore an amused listening face […] Once or twice he rearranged the light waterproof which he had slung over one shoulder in toreador fashion.
The tone of the narrator here is gently mocking. This comes across in the playfully judgmental description of how Corley “was just bringing a long monologue to a close” and how Lenehan continuously “rearranged the light waterproof which he had slung over one shoulder in toreador fashion.” In comparing Lenehan’s movements to a “toreador”—or Spanish bullfighter—the narrator is teasing Lenehan for exaggerating the simple movement of adjusting a raincoat for dramatic effect.
The tone becomes more earnest as Lenehan and Corley separate about midway through the story and Joyce grants readers a look into Lenehan’s hidden sadness:
He would be thirty-one in November. Would he never get a good job? Would he never have a home of his own? He thought how pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to sit by and a good dinner to sit down to.
The tone here has lost its tongue-in-cheek nature. The narrator is no longer mocking the young men but showing readers how, deep down, these young men are aware of their discontentment and longing for a different way to live.
