Pulling No Punches : THE PUGILIST AT REST, <i> By Thom Jones (Little, Brown: $18.95; 230 pp.)</i>

“Until you forgive yourself, you cannot love anyone or do a drop of good anywhere or anyhow,” insists one of the dogged survivors who people the dark post-Vietnam American landscape of Thom Jones’ fine, unsettling short stories. It’s a declaration unlike almost any other in the book. Such hopeful earnestness must be short-lived amid Jones’ catalogue of epilepsy, social disease, chemotherapy, ring wounds, bone rot and firefights. Medical science throws its feeble punches--the speaker above is “the best trauma ‘blade’ in the city”--but cures, especially the psychoactive ones, are at best reprieves.

Part of what Jones manages in these 11 stories (besides declaring his arrival as an audacious and powerful talent) is to keep us laughing, albeit in the dark growls of one offended. His strategies are risky. In the lengthiest story here, “Silhouettes,” the author seems to love his learning-challenged (“special ed”) character as an entomologist loves bugs, with a mixture of empathy and clinical sobriety.

Jones dances close to mocking his protagonist, “Window,” (as do Window’s ad-hoc champions, a high-school janitorial crew), yet ends up showing us that the world that most of us dismiss with a glance down the corridor can be rich, profanely witty, vital and, what’s more, brimming with a rude but exemplary kindness.

“Why don’t you just drink a bottle of Drano and get it over with,” counsels Window’s adviser Meldrick even as he pushes romantic advice on him, “I can’t stand watching you go through this. . . .” It would require much explaining, (but only a few pages of Jones’s deceptively casual prose) to evoke why your heart leaps up with the story’s final, seemingly humdrum note that “. . . at East High, the designated operator of the scrubber was janitor king of the day.”

That story and one other (a somewhat strained excursion in a young professional woman’s voice, “Unchain My Heart”) emerge as stand-alone creations. The remaining nine combine, in jigsaw puzzle fashion, to make the map of the narrator’s shadowy heart. Even when the name (or, in “I Want to Live!,” the voice) mutates, a central warrior/philosopher who shares some of Jones’ own biography is speaking beneath.

Together these stories make something quite like a novel, one with forebears like Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger” and Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot.” The voice is street- and battle-wise, gruffly seasoned but ultimately wounded. We meet our man as a combat-zone Marine called “Hollywood” (so named because he trained for Vietnam force reconnaissance duty out West, at Camp Pendleton). In the title story and its successor, we ride with him into a firefight, and by the time he’s been battered in the third story into chronic temporal-lobe epilepsy in a Corps boxing match, we’ve heard both childhood history (chinked in almost too cleverly between cliffhanger episodes in the firefight) and the often-bitter aftermath of his life in the military. It’s a quintessentially American story of our time with echoes of the brutalized ‘50s.

Music, usually rock, threads through Jones’ tones-of-gray monologues. The Doors supply his reconnaissance unit’s name (“Break on Through”) and soundtrack. The drum roll from “Wipe Out” stokes Don Juan’s charisma, a banjo duet on “Shantytown” demoralizes an asylum visitor and such chestnuts as “Unchain My Heart” and “Silhouettes” provide titles and in part, themes. The howlin’ wolf and little red rooster of blues tradition take lowercase cameos without special fanfare.

When Hollywood comes out of the jungle where his best buddy has died, he’s carrying the guilt that prompts his bad ring beating. We take sick with him. If the resonance with the more dour modern philosophers is familiar, Jones’s accounts of life on “this brutal, pitiless planet” don’t demand academic legitimizing; they stand on their own, hard and real but not quite remorseless. From the start, we detect almost unconscious homage to, say, Robert Stone (the post-Vietnam, pill-scarfing Ray Hicks of “Dog Soldiers” shares Jones’s obsession with Nietsche as portable psychic armor). And the frequent Schopenhauer citations intrude slightly. But Jones’ steady strength is in the unprettified dialogue, in the fine gutbucket descriptions where irony tangles with Hemingwayan macho. One nice passage shows how our man’s two Staffordshire terriers will spot him having an epileptic fit in his sleep, drag him out of his possibly suffocating bedding and lay him face up in the kitchen. (“There’s Gloria barking in my face,” says our still-capable-of-wonder narrator. “Isn’t this incredible?”)

In successive stories beginning the book’s middle section, we’re discomfitingly faced with a coldhearted Don Juan (who brings a “psychopathic charisma” to his “perfect art” before playing “that non-involvement theme”); by the book’s final section, Jones has moved right onto the knife edge between despair and glory.

In Jones’s title story, he meditates on the statue of “The Pugilist at Rest,” reputedly the great gladiator Theogenes, and the thousand-plus men he punched to death. “Then, as now, violence, suffering and cheapness of life were the rule,” he writes, and soon reflects on the “reservoir of poison, malice and vicious sadism in my soul” he discovered in the jungle. But his beating transfigures him, and he begins to feel “sympathetic to the cares and sufferings of all living creatures. You lose your health and you start thinking this way.”

The insight is ordinary enough. But not only is it hard-won--as opposed to the sort of material the blade man calls “boring crap about a 45-year-old upper-level executive in boat shoes driving around Cape Cod in a Volvo”--it’s surrounded by lucid, unblinking, quietly angry proof of our practiced stoniness toward those in pain. Just occasionally, we glimpse someone who’s capable of mercy, and of that precious self-forgiveness. Jones has something fundamental to say to us, and the fortunate part is he’s got the craft and grit to make us listen hard.