The parallel stories of the multiple Isaacs makes me think of all the "rebooting" going on in TV and movies these days. Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, and, in a different way, James Bond and Doctor Who, all follow this pattern of re-presenting a hero in ways that will make him seem more palatable... but of course, "reboot" is itself just a modern way of making that very process, ancient as it is, easier to understand for modern audiences. I just came from a reading where Susan Orlean was talking about the many incarnations of Rin-Tin-Tin, fictional and otherwise, and how the public maintained an idea of a sort of continuity of character, even though both the real dogs and the fictional dogs could not logically have that continuity.

With this poem, we have a sort of aesthetic synthesis of such parallel stories, which is, after all, what's going on in the collective readers' mind, if not in the mind of a single sophisticated reader, who is capable of absorbing all three versions of the myth and regarding them as non-contradictory facets of the same object. The fact that the story in question deals with death and rebirth (actual or virtual) makes it work at a whole other level as well.