182 he Sensational World of he Running Man Mari Hatavara & Jarkko Toikkanen Richard Bachman’s (Stephen King’s) novel he Running Man (1982) portrays a future world dominated by a television company that broadcasts reality shows abundant with physical torment and injuries. Ben Richards participates in the deadliest of the games, “he Running Man,” to inance the treatment of his ill little girl. he contestant runs for his life across the United States hunted by hitmen and forced to send live video of each of his days on the run. his article focuses on the representation of the sensational world of he Running Man, portraying the year 2025. More speciically, we concentrate on studying the relationship between the storyworld and the protagonist observing it. he elements composing the world – a dominant company, an underprivileged man with an ill child – suggests a plotline familiar from many dystopian ictions in which the system inevitably crushes individuals and their lone eforts. his readerly expectation of a hero struggling against an evil oppressor is enhanced by the narrative mode, with the internal focalization of the protagonist. A focalizing character is endowed with a speciic attribute among the characters, which may be understood either to entail readerly sympathy towards that character or to warn the reader about possible fallacies in their perception (see Prince 2001, 49–51). his possibility to interpret internal focalization as causing either sympathy or estrangement comes with a twist in he Running Man. Besides using the protagonist’s internal focalization, the novel portrays him as an aggressive and possibly mentally unstable character through the third-person narrator and the other characters. Our question in this article is aptly formulated by Gerald J. Prince (2001, 49) when he discusses the signiicance of internal focalization