Joyce`s "After the Race" is a story about the competition between races (ethnicity and nations) as well as about a sporting competition. Jimmy Doyle, the protagonist, is breathless, speedy, and excited throughout the story. He thinks that he will be lifted from the provincialism of Dublin life by allying himself with international companions. He fawns upon them, trying to attract their attention, so that this attention can authenticate the fiction of himself, his ideal self as a masculine cosmopolitan. His illusion is created by a dizzying ride in the car, by the exciting dinner party and by the card game, an illusion that he belongs to the group of the international companions rather than to his own colonized people. He also deludes himself into thinking that he is a masculine sportsman rather than an Irish man, feminized by a patriarchal colonizer. In order to cover his sense of Irish inferiority, he desperately holds on to this illusion until he finds himself fleeced and betrayed by those whom he has considered his emancipators. That night the city wears "the mask of a capital." (The real capital, however, is London). But Dublin is not a capital, any more than is Jimmy a Continental playboy, but the idea of the masquerade and its attendant illusion permeates the story.