A Supermarket in California carried the dead into the underworld, across the river Styx. The River Lethe was a different river in the underworld, which caused those who drank its waters to experience complete forgetfulness. The shades of the dead were required to drink the waters of the Lethe in order to forget their earthly life. In "Story Line", Ian Marshall suggests that the poem is written to show the differences in American life depicted by Whitman and that which faces Ginsberg in the 1950s: "It's the distance of a century—with Civil War and the 'triumph' of the Industrial Revolution and Darwinism and Freud
Isle of the Dead (Zelazny novel) which is responding to a call for help from a friend, Ruth Laris. In the course of investigating her disappearance, he receives another message that he will find all his friends "on the Isle of the Dead". The message is in Pei'an, addressed to "Shimbo" (the name of the Pei'an god connected with Sandow) and signed by "Belion" (Shimbo's traditional enemy in Pei'an mythology). Sandow soon learns that somebody has been stealing the memory records and tissue samples of people who died on Earth. These things are required of everyone who lives on Earth, so they can be recalled to