Of all Ferris' characters, Tom Mota expresses his desire to break away from conformity and escape the entrepreneurial mindset he has adopted for so long. However serious the intention, Tom finds himself forced in this passage to mock the culture he became a part of by returning to his old workplace. This compulsion reveals Tom's continued association with the environment, making it clear that he finds moving on problematic. As Ferris suggests, conformity in modern America is pervasive and once initiated, rejecting one's identity is not simple. Tom Mota remains preoccupied with his identity in relation to the advertising agency described by Ferris in the novel. The passage begins when the narrator explains Tom's real intentions to "make fun of" his ex-colleagues; to him, these actions are part of an absurd joke. The very real fears and anxieties of Tom's targets come from their belief that Tom actually wants them harm and that the gun he is holding contains real bullets. As Tom's main targets are individualized by the narrator, a central quality of the office mentality emerges, a distinctive characteristic of each employee is used to differentiate them. These distinctions also communicate Tom's motivations for targeting each of the individuals, Jim Jackers is "an idiot", Dan Wisdom is a "fish painter", and Marcia Dwyer is "the real star of the agency". These synecdoches reaffirm the assertion later in the passage that "how little" these people "really know each other", engaging only superficially and for commercial purposes, they remain a mystery to each other. Frequently in this passage, as throughout the passage. Throughout the novel, Ferris adopts a first-person plural narration ... middle of paper ...... between the passage and represents a sort of breaking point. He is frustrated and irritated by the effect his time at the advertising agency has had on him. The most docile and level-headed colleagues may not be capable of such extreme behavior, but risk being just as spiritually damaged by the limitations of their professional lives. Tom, although exceptionally unsuited to corporate life, has serious difficulty extricating himself from the situation. Although he opposes the operation of the agency, intending to disparage its practices, he remains committed to its influence and, in many ways, defeats his own purpose. Tom's struggle in this passage is made absurd and darkly comic for literary effect. It is interested in the need to reconstruct an identity outside of a framework that has been part of the individual long enough to become an integral part of it...