In his book on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin wrote that "character interests Dostoevsky as a specific point of view on the world and on himself. As a semantic and evaluative position on himself and on the reality that surrounds him": this view of character, which goes beyond the notion of a container of a list of traits, may provide an interesting key to explore how Wallace's formal and linguistic choices, most notably, the interplay of focalization and narrating instances and the employment of deixis, reveal his way of staging the semantic (and evaluative) skeleton of being in the postindustrial world he and his characters live in; the focus on these choices in which follows is not narratological for its own sake but - hopefully - paves the way for a deeper understanding of readers' experiencing Wallace's text and their own being in the world.