La boxe underground

La boxe underground is the novel’s recurring world of illegal combat, a concealed economy in which physical skill, secrecy, money, and violence are inseparable. Its central venue, Ares Garden, presents itself publicly as a bar while operating as a site for clandestine fights. The institution gives Jungkook a livelihood and a language for anger, yet it also places his already injured body inside a system that rewards escalation. Its decisive significance lies in this contradiction: the ring makes Jungkook feel powerful and purposeful, but it repeatedly brings him close to becoming indistinguishable from the violence he has survived.

Definition and Structure

Ares Garden’s cover is deliberately ordinary. Chen maintains a bar where police officers come to drink and sometimes watch the fights, and their presence does not protect the law so much as reveal its corruption. The officers know what takes place there and remain silent because Chen has made the arrangement useful and dangerous at once. Underground boxing therefore exists not outside society but within a compromised network of hospitality, surveillance, money, and intimidation. The bar’s public identity conceals the ring’s illegal function, while the officials who should expose it become part of its protection.

The fighters operate under recognizable rules even though the contests themselves are unlawful. The three-tap signal against the floor means that a combatant has submitted and that the fight must end. In Jungkook’s confrontation with Andrew Wilson, Andrew uses that signal when Jungkook’s assault becomes unbearable, but Jungkook is too consumed by rage to notice it. The rule establishes a limit that the fighters and audience are expected to respect; Jungkook’s failure to do so marks the moment when competition becomes uncontrolled violence and places his future in the underground circuit at risk.

Jungkook’s Work and Physical Practice

Jungkook treats the fights as work. Before one evening’s contest, he prepares his sports bag, drives to Ares Garden, and tells Chen that preparation is always necessary. He later explains to Shelby that he has been taking part in illegal fights since his final year of high school. This detail gives the practice a long history: it is not a passing experiment but a central part of his transition from adolescence into adulthood, begun when he was still very young and sustained because it provides money while offering a form of identity.

The work is also secret. Jungkook tells Shelby that the university does not know how he earns his living and asks her not to disclose it. His request separates his student identity from his underground identity, creating a double life in which the disciplined university athlete or artist can coexist with the tattooed fighter who enters a dark ring at night. The secrecy protects his income and reputation, but it also prevents ordinary forms of accountability. Chen, Namjoon, and the spectators know one Jungkook; the university is allowed to know another.

The physical technique can be precise and highly controlled. In one fight, Jungkook combines hooks, uppercuts, and knee strikes, prevents his opponent from reaching him, then drives a right punch into the man’s ribs before knocking him out with a straight blow to the face. Chen joins him to declare him the winner. This scene presents boxing as skill rather than mere brutality: timing, movement, and tactical control produce victory. Yet the same body that demonstrates mastery is repeatedly injured. Jungkook enters another contest with his abdomen already covered in bruises, and Andrew targets those injuries with punches and kicks, turning prior damage into a weapon against him.

Violence, Rage, and Loss of Control

The most revealing fight at Ares Garden begins with Jungkook already compromised. He is not fully himself, although Chen and Namjoon fail to recognize it. For the first time, he opens the contest by offering his opponent an opening; the crowd falls silent as he spreads his arms and allows himself to be struck. He hits the floor and absorbs repeated blows, a reversal of the confident fighter who normally controls the pace. The ring exposes a body that is present but psychologically displaced, unable or unwilling to defend itself.

The earlier fight against Andrew reverses that helplessness with equal violence. Andrew exploits Jungkook’s injuries, mocks him, and invokes the failures attributed to him by his father. Those insults do not remain verbal. Jungkook rises through an apparently impossible effort, strikes Andrew in the throat, sits over him, and repeats the punches and kicks he has just received. Blood covers his fist, while the surge of adrenaline intensifies rather than satisfies his rage. Andrew’s three taps should end the contest, but Jungkook ignores them until Chen physically pulls him away.

The scene makes the ring a mechanism of emotional displacement. Jungkook’s anger is not limited to the opponent before him; Andrew’s references to his father reactivate an older humiliation, and the fight becomes an attack on everything that has made Jungkook feel powerless. Underground boxing offers a socially recognizable outlet for aggression, but its structure cannot distinguish between controlled retaliation and traumatic reenactment once Jungkook’s anger overwhelms judgment. The very skill that lets him survive the ring becomes dangerous when adrenaline replaces rules.

Family Trauma and Learned Violence

The roots of Jungkook’s relationship with violence reach back to his childhood in Seoul. When he is eight, Ye-jun holds him back from entering the kitchen during a violent argument between their parents. Jungkook is furious and grief-stricken, and he protests that he is tired of his father and mother fighting. The child’s impulse is already to intervene physically in a conflict larger than himself; Ye-jun’s embrace restrains him because protection, in that household, requires preventing another child from being injured.

Sunmi later remembers that Jungkook once returned to her home with his face badly injured. He claimed that he had fought at school and that Namjoon had rescued him before the situation became worse, but the truth was that his father had beaten him. Jungkook eventually ran away at sixteen and took refuge with Sunmi, while his father did not attempt to find him. Sunmi welcomed him without hesitation, and Jungkook remained grateful to her. Her account connects the underground fighter’s toughness to an earlier history of concealment, domestic violence, and premature self-reliance. The adolescent who learns to hide a beating as a school fight later enters a world where injury can be displayed, monetized, and admired.

Sunmi also sees that Jungkook’s darkness has led him toward substances and other forms of self-destruction that a sixteen-year-old should never have encountered. The ring is consequently part of a broader pattern rather than an isolated occupation. Namjoon’s distress after Jungkook relapses into destructive behavior shows how the consequences extend beyond the fighter himself: his closest friend recognizes that Jungkook needs help but is exhausted by his refusal to accept it. Sunmi’s therapeutic and maternal presence offers a counter-model to the ring’s demands, one based on shelter, attention, and the possibility of speaking rather than striking.

Shelby’s Entry into the Ring

Shelby first encounters Ares Garden as an observer, but her relationship to the place changes when she returns and trains there herself. After watching Jungkook fight, she changes into sports clothes and wears bandages already dulled by the blows she has delivered to a punching bag without gloves. Her hands hurt, yet she experiences that pain as different from the blade associated with her self-harm. The contrast is crucial: boxing gives her a physical discharge that feels active and controlled, even though it remains connected to pain.

Her first underground contest becomes a dangerous imitation of Jungkook’s rage. Jungkook watches from outside the ring, furious with himself because he brought Shelby to the one place where she should not have been. He cannot enter to stop the fight. When the gong sounds, Shelby attacks with a punch to the stomach and an uppercut, then continues striking until hatred blinds her. Her opponent recognizes that Shelby is carrying unbearable torment and waits for her to tire, expecting tears before attempting to finish the contest. The ring thus reveals a shared psychological mechanism: both Jungkook and Shelby convert private trauma into public combat, and both risk confusing endurance with recovery.

Shelby’s presence also changes Jungkook’s perception of his own world. He is accustomed to the ring as a private domain of money and adrenaline, but seeing her absorb and reproduce its violence forces him to confront its contagious quality. The place does not merely express what wounded people already feel; it teaches a vocabulary of blows, escalation, spectatorship, and victory. Shelby’s participation makes Jungkook responsible for the environment he once treated as his own refuge.

Narrative Significance and Limits

Underground boxing functions as a pressure chamber for the novel’s central conflicts: pain against care, secrecy against disclosure, discipline against compulsion, and inherited violence against deliberate change. It provides Jungkook with competence and economic independence, and it creates the circumstances in which Shelby can discover a form of bodily release. At the same time, Ares Garden is protected by corrupt police, governed by dangerous men, and sustained by an audience that can hesitate even when a fighter is being beaten beyond the accepted limit.

The concept’s importance extends beyond the fights themselves. Jungkook’s later movement toward tattoo work, including his preparation for graduation and eventual installation at N’s Ink, suggests a transfer of bodily skill from an economy of injury to an artistic trade. His combat experience remains part of his history, but it no longer has to be the only way his hands, endurance, and attention can produce a future. La boxe underground therefore represents both survival and entrapment: it is the place where Jungkook learns to withstand pain, and the place that teaches him why surviving pain is not the same as healing.