Schacht always prefers a pleasant match, one way or the other. He really doesn’t care all that much whether he wins anymore, since first the Crohn’s and then the knee at sixteen. He’d probably now describe his desire to win as a preference, nothing more. What’s singular is that his tennis seems to have improved slightly in the two years since he stopped really caring. It’s like his hard flat game stopped having any purpose beyond itself and started feeding on itself and got fuller, looser, its edges less jagged, though everybody else has been improving too, even faster, and Schacht’s rank has
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Schacht is an interesting character: the only one who seems to have transcended The Show and instead plays for the simple pleasure of the game. By not bowing to the stress and pressure of competition, by being by definition separate from that world, he interestingly enough becomes the only real well-adjusted character at E.T.A. and therefore a very important study of character in Wallace's often empty, character-less imagined world. He's also just about the only person besides Mario who helps his fellow man (Pemulis) out of genuine unthinking empathy, and notably the only character who seems to be indifferent towards Substances (what AA would call "a moderate drinker").
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