The Pugilist at Rest: Stories

The Pugilist at Rest: Stories brings together eleven short stories from debut author Thom Jones. First published in 1993, this collection was a finalist for the National Book Award and the title story won an O. Henry Award. In each of these tales, Jones tells the stories of people living in the margins, buried under the weight of twentieth-century violence and life's appalling inequities. They are each survivors in their own unique ways, and while none of these stories could convincingly pass as optimistic, they thrum with a life and authenticity that illustrates the indomitable humanity of the spirit.

"The Pugilist at Rest" opens the volume. This story, originally published in The New Yorker in 1991, set the literary world on fire, making Jones an instant celebrity of American letters. It chronicles the experiences of a Vietnam veteran struggling with depression and epilepsy. The story begins with the narrator remembering, years later, an experience he had at Marine boot camp in 1966. A fellow recruit writes a letter to his girlfriend, beginning it with the words, "Hey Baby." The other recruits catch him and read what he has written; forever after, he's known as Hey Baby. Hey Baby is something of a bully toward the narrator's friend, Jorgenson. The narrator strikes Hey Baby with the butt of his gun, fracturing Hey Baby's skull, but because the narrator is well-liked, no one rats him out.

In the present, the narrator is cleaning out his attic. He finds his Marine uniform and the medals he won, prompting further recollections.



Three days after arriving in Vietnam all those years ago, the narrator, Jorgenson, and their platoon are sent into battle. The conflict is bloody, with numerous casualties on the American side. As the narrator lies bleeding, a Vietnamese soldier approaches him. Just them, Jorgenson shrieks, and the soldier turns to Jorgenson instead, stabbing him in the chest. After American planes start dropping bombs and napalm, the narrator finds his footing and escapes.

In all, he does three tours of duty in Vietnam. What he did and saw on those tours haunt him to this day. It began with wanting to avenge what happened to Jorgenson, but now it is all-consuming aggression and hostility and enduring violence—violence for which he won awards during the war.

After returning to the States, the narrator begins drinking and smoking heavily. He remains in the Marines and, sometime in the mid-1970s, takes part in a boxing match. Though he wins the match, he has headaches and double-vision for weeks afterward.



His health failing, the narrator turns inward. He muses philosophically, wondering about his penchant for fighting and hurting other people. He finds unlikely refuge in the writing of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

A year passes, and the narrator suffers from epilepsy. He has seizures that incapacitate him. However, for a split-second before each seizure, he has a moment of transcendence in which he experiences something divine, and, just for that brief instant, he believes in God.

The epilepsy worsens; the narrator can hardly leave his home. He wears helmets and a mouthguard to protect himself. He takes medications and has two support dogs. His depression also worsens.



A neurosurgeon visits the narrator. The doctor convinces him to have a procedure called a cingulotomy that will supposedly cure his depression. The controversial procedure involves cauterizing a part of the brain, destroying nerve connections. The narrator, though unconvinced it will work, agrees.

He thinks then of his old friend Jorgenson. He confesses that he tried to take the credit for killing the soldiers that Jorgenson actually killed. The narrator's claims almost qualified him for the Medal of Honor, but no one could back up his story.

He then thinks of God and of that moment before his seizures when he experiences something sacred. Maybe it isn't God after all; just a neurochemical blip.



As he waits to have the cingulotomy, the narrator's thoughts turn to his dogs. If the procedure doesn't go as planned, he hopes he is well enough to keep his dogs and not end up in an institution. The story ends on this ambiguous note.

The other stories collected here follow similarly lost characters as they try to make sense of the world and their place in it. A business executive from Los Angeles is in a bus crash in Bombay and attempts to save a horse dying in the surf of the Arabian Sea. An up-and-coming boxer takes his trainer to rehab, discussing the works of Nietzsche along the way. A writer has a soul-stirring love affair with a deep-sea diver. A woman endures the brutality of chemotherapy.

Ultimately, the tales that comprise The Pugilist at Rest: Stories are not the dark and depressing narratives one might initially assume. Each story's central character is moving through a dark night of the soul, to be certain, but none are on the verge of giving up. Even the narrator of the title story wants to believe the cingulotomy can save him. So, in the end, these characters touch upon a universal truth about the human experience: as Nietzsche said, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger."