The allegorically moralising play, Everyman (Elckerlijc, Everyman, Jederman) has a long tradition in European literature, with roots going back to the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:9-31) and the ars moriendi. The Everyman presents a parable of common (an accepted) human behaviour (living a Christian life pleasing to God) and a parable of behaviour in a particular situation (facing death). My hypothesis is that the perpetuity of the parable of the Everyman is called into question, as the alienation of man renders the previously accepted and fixed patterns of behaviour and conduct inoperative. The crisis of modern man has also been brought about by the redefinition of the concept of subjectivity, the breakdown of faith in God, and the bourgeois/consumerist social order. I base my assumptions in part on the many adaptations of the Everyman in the 20th-century world and Hungarian literature, as well as on the works of Julie Paulson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Erich Fromm. I intend to justify my theory by a detailed presentation of the dramatised parables in Borbély’s drama Akár Akárki, which can also be interpreted as mise en abyme.