Martin ordered an audit of a pop singer

Martin’s order for a tax audit is a small but decisive act in which personal dissatisfaction hardens into bureaucratic violence. After the fight, he goes to the office, recognizes in his colleagues what others see in him—tax officials—and realizes that he is one of them. The audit therefore becomes more than an administrative procedure: it is his reflexive response to the identity he has come to inhabit.

Recognition of a Bureaucratic Self

The scene begins with Martin looking around the office and suddenly seeing his colleagues from the outside. Their shared identity as tax officials, previously ordinary or invisible to him, becomes unmistakable, and the recognition immediately turns inward. He asks how he could have become a tax official, treating the question as a crisis of self-recognition rather than as a practical inquiry about his career.

His computer provides a visual history of the transformation. School photographs show Martin before he was a tax official, while university photographs show him wearing a tie and solving crossword puzzles with a serious, almost devoted expression. The sequence presents his bureaucratic identity as something that formed gradually, through habits and signs that were already visible before he consciously acknowledged it. The photographs do not reveal a single turning point; they make the change appear cumulative and difficult to undo.

The Tie and the Pop Singer

Martin looks down at himself and loosens his tie, but the gesture produces insecurity rather than liberation. He tightens it again, exposing the tie as both a symbol of his office and a kind of support for the self he has become. His brief attempt to undo it cannot survive the uncertainty that follows.

Distractedly turning through a magazine, Martin stops at a picture of a pop singer posed in deliberate informality: tousled hair, an open shirt, and metal rings on his fingers. The singer embodies a visual opposite to Martin’s tied, regulated appearance. Martin hesitates for several seconds before acting, so the eventual order carries the pressure of that contrast. The singer is not shown committing any offense in the scene; what attracts Martin’s attention is the singer’s conspicuous freedom from the official image Martin can neither escape nor comfortably accept.

The Audit as Action

Martin reaches for the telephone and orders a tax audit of the singer. The decision converts an inward crisis into an outward administrative act. Instead of abandoning the office identity that troubles him, he uses its authority against a figure who represents another mode of being. The audit is thus both an exercise of professional power and a displaced reaction to Martin’s own unease.

The scene’s value shift moves from self-conscious dissatisfaction to renewed, if unstable, control. Martin cannot change the photographs, the tie, or the history they disclose, but he can make the institutional machinery respond to someone else. The order gives his discomfort a target and transforms passivity into action without resolving the underlying recognition.

The final gesture preserves that contradiction. After ordering the audit, Martin slowly and deliberately loosens his tie. This time the movement follows the assertion of official power rather than preceding it. The loosened tie does not signify that he has escaped his bureaucratic identity; it becomes a controlled performance of distance from it, undertaken after he has reaffirmed the authority that identity grants him.

Narrative Significance

Martin’s action condenses the book’s concern with unstable identities and the gap between appearance and transformation. The photographs make his development legible as a progression, while the pop singer’s image confronts him with an alternative surface that seems casual, physical, and unregulated. Martin responds not through conversation or self-examination but through the telephone and the tax system.

The episode also gives institutional language a distinctly personal charge. A tax audit is ostensibly impersonal, yet its immediate origin lies in Martin’s recognition of himself and his discomfort with what that recognition means. His professional role supplies the means by which private insecurity can become public pressure. By the end, the tie remains loosened but not discarded, and Martin remains both dissatisfied with the tax official he has become and dependent on the power of that position.