In this story, Joyce reiterates the motif of a circular path that leads nowhere, introduced by implication in “After the Race.” The author is even more compulsive than usual at including actual Dublin place names in “Two Gallants”—to a fault, perhaps. He does so partly to stress the story’s veracity. These events could really happen, Joyce is telling us—maybe they did! But he also does this so that readers familiar with the city’s geography would recognize that Lenehan, who will reappear in Joyce’s novel Ulysses, ends his evening’s odyssey not far from where he began it. Like Jimmy in “After the Race,” Eveline (in the story of the same name), and the protagonist of “An Encounter,” Lenehan has ventured out only to return to the place where he began. Clearly, the three frustrated characters who preceded him are going home after their stories conclude.
In keeping with a common theme in Dubliners, “Two Gallants” lays blame with the Catholic Church for Irish paralysis: The blue-and-white of the slavey’s outfit recalls the Virgin Mary’s traditional colors. But England is especially responsible here; almost every place name referenced on Lenehan’s pointless roundabout, from Rutland Square (named for an English politician) to the neighborhood near (Protestant) Trinity College and City Hall, was associated by Irish-Catholic Dubliners with the English.
The street on which “Two Gallants” concludes is a dead end. Obviously Corley (a kind of poor man’s criminal mastermind) and the slavey (a thief, by story’s end) are already dead, in a spiritual sense. Lenehan, killing time on a warm summer evening merely so that he can witness a petty crime, is not far behind.
Finally, symbolism in this story is fairly straightforward, though sometimes ironical. The harp is a time-honored emblem of Ireland and means precisely what it appears to. The double halo around the moon, however, appears here as a reminder that neither Lenehan nor Corley is a saint, and that the woman in blue and white is no virgin. Joyce’s private symbolic system (using the colors of yellow and brown to indicate decay) takes over at the end of “Two Gallants”—the coin the young woman steals is yellow in color.
