Man Equals Man

Main Characters and Their Development

• Galy Gay is a simple porter whose fate becomes the stage for an experiment on human personality. His naive trustfulness and pliability turn him into clay in the hands of circumstance and others' will, allowing those around him to reshape his essence as if he were a faceless mass ready to take any form. Throughout the play, Galy Gay journeys from a harmless everyman to an anonymous soldier, losing his individuality and dissolving into the collective, which becomes a tragic symbol of the vulnerability of human nature in the face of societal pressure. Sergeant Fairchild, Jesse, Uriah, and Polly are soldiers whose characters are filled with irony and sarcasm; they act as peculiar demiurges, playing with Galy Gay's fate, testing his resilience, and demonstrating how easily a human personality can be destroyed and rebuilt. Their cruelty and indifference highlight the fragility of individuality and the ruthlessness of the depersonalization mechanism. The hippopotamus woman, a vendor, becomes the voice of worldly wisdom and cynicism; observing Galy Gay's transformation from the perspective of an outsider, she embodies the indifference of the crowd, for whom human tragedy is just another story. Each character in the play is not just a figure, but a vivid stroke in the overall picture, where a person appears as a being capable of being reshaped beyond recognition if circumstances or the will of others demand it.