Sentences by Joyce

Here are some identifiable sentence types in Joyce’s “Grace”:

“By grace of these two articles of clothing, he said, a man could always pass muster.”
This is an inversion of a normal pattern, and therefore sentence type 15. Joyce could have said “He said that by grace of these two articles of clothing a man could always pass muster.” But instead Joyce reverts it instead.

“Mr. Power, a much younger man, was employed in the Royal Irish Constabulary Office in Dublin Castle.”
Grammatically, the sentence could work without the additional information that “a much younger man” provides. This fragment, framed by commas serves as the sentence modifier.

“Two nights after, his friends came to see him.”
Here, a prepositional phrase precedes the subject and the verb. His friends came to see him, but before that we learn that they did so two nights after. This is pattern #14.

Repeatedly, Joyce has short sentences for the purpose of a transition:
“There were worse husbands. “
This is an example of pattern 19. In the context, the sentence provides a transition between two ideas in a paragraph. In this case, it moves us from a description of the character to his relation with his wife.

Again and again, Joyce has long, explanatory sentences bound to each other by dry, shorter ones. For example:
“The part of mother presented to her no insuperable difficulties and for twenty-five years she had kept the house shrewdly for her husband. Her two eldest sons were launched.”
Notice the contrast between the first sentence and the one that follows it. First, Joyce gives us a long sentence that is sophisticated in content and longer than the one that precedes it. The second, shorter sentence, grounds us by stating a quick fact that also serves as a transition for a second idea, in this case, details about the sons:

“One was in a draper’s shop in Glasgow and the other was a clerk to a tea-merchant in Belfast.”
Joyce resort to this pattern to give us profound insight about his characters, but then reinforce it with realism- precise, perhaps mundane details that take us from idea to day to day fact.
“They were good sons, wrote regularly and sometimes sent money. The other children were still in school.”
Stating the sons were good is then made concrete by details, then me move to precise, irrevocable facts. The other children were still in school.
In the example above, we see a pattern Joyce is fond of, a simple one- A, B and C.
“He took a mouthful, drew it up, saturated his palate with t and then spat it forth into the grate”
This pattern allows the narrator to strip himself of the power of omniscience and become merely a reporter, a witness. Humanizing the narrator may be the reason why after every philosophical insight to the characters, he grounds the rhetoric with facts.
The powers of the narrator are not taken away, but filtered. During the first paragraph, the voice merely reports, knows just as much as we do, it takes a while before we get inside the characters. Joyce wants us to see them outside before we know their minds. He first drops a quick line about the silk hat, points it out to us but doesn’t tell us why its important to the charter until latter.
In fact, a clear break between observing fact and explaining ideas via a gap in the prose (page 259), when we move from Mr. Power to Mrs. Kernan. The latter has more information about Mr. Kernan, who the story seems to be about. Therefore, we move from seeing this unknown man in the ground to the insides of his home life. First a question- Who is he? And then the answer.