One utterance that portrays the imprisoning powerlessness of the characters is when the nameless narrator hears the man at the Asamansudo rally say,

Alone, I am nothing. I have nothing. We have power. But we will never know it; we will never see it work. Unless we choose to come together to make it work.

While this quote could be read as a beacon of hope, in the context of the story, it demonstrates the hopelessness of the situation. Based on the narrator’s point of view, the people will not come together and they cannot make it work. What the people are interested in is corruption; it’s like they lack the power to resist graft. Even the bus driver engages in grafting.

As for actions, it’d be apt to talk about the actions of Koomson as portraying a kind of powerlessness. It also might be interesting to talk about the actions of the narrator himself as portraying helplessness. He tries to take the moral high ground, yet even he seems to have trouble resisting the decrepitude of his surroundings. If he is as morally upright as he comes across, someone might wonder why he devotes so much attention to excrement.