Symbols of religion - death and resurrection - in Dubliners

Grace, the penultimate story in James Joyce's "Dubliners," is clearly overshadowed by the famous final story in the collection, The Dead, and rightly so, I guess - the three or four stories preceding The Dead each have the feeling of a prelude, of Joyce's working on some themes and ideas that he will pull together in the final story. Grace is no doubt, as evident from the title, the most overtly religio-symbolic in the collection, as story that cries out, perhaps a little too loudly, for interpretation - as do some of Flannery O'Connor's stories, to cite an American counterpart. A man falls down the stairs and is found injured on the floor in what I think is a men's room in a Dublin pub. Nobody knows who he is or how he got there. Eventually, two other men - one of whom is a slight acquaintance - help the fallen man to his feet and bring him home. The symbolism here could not be more obvious - especially when we later learn that the fallen man had been drinking with a loan shark known as the Irish Jew. Story gets a little more complicated and strange back at the fallen man's home, where several cronies come to visit him in convalescence and they make plans to bring him to church and to get him off the "boose" - but, again, it seems that the friends are some version of the Gospels, preaching the word? This story, unlike most of the others in Dubliners, is one that points beyond itself and is interesting for what it represents and suggests and less so for what it directly conveys.