Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses the narrator's attempts to escape his suffering through the philosophy of Schopenhauer, as well as the significance of his epilepsy.

The depressed, epileptic Vietnam veteran who narrates “The Pugilist at Rest” and whose life is a toxic cocktail of pain, cruelty, aggression, and suffering is not an isolated figure in Jones's short fiction. The same basic character appears in “Break on Through” and “The Black Lights,” the two stories that immediately follow “The Pugilist at Rest” in Jones's first collection of stories. All three stories are told in the first person by a Force Recon Marine who has been on several tours of Vietnam and has won medals for his courage in combat. His is a violent, masculine world in which the tougher and more ruthless...