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.
