Overview
“Trip to Hanoi” is a long autobiographical essay by the American writer and critic Susan Sontag (1933–2004), arising from a visit she made to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War in 1968. It was published as a short book and also appears as one of the essays in Sontag’s collection Styles of Radical Will (1969), which followed her celebrated first essay collection, Against Interpretation (1966). The piece belongs to the tradition of the politically engaged intellectual travelogue, but it is unusual in being intensely introspective: rather than functioning simply as reportage or propaganda, it turns the trip into an occasion for self-examination.
Sontag traveled to Hanoi at a moment when the war was a central preoccupation of the American Left and of intellectuals internationally, and when a number of Western writers and activists visited North Vietnam partly as a gesture of solidarity and partly to bear witness. Sontag was, by the late 1960s, a prominent figure in the New York intellectual world, known for her essays on aesthetics, sensibility, and modern culture, and increasingly outspoken in her opposition to American foreign policy.
Content and Approach
The essay is written in a candid, diary-like, reflective mode. Its distinctive feature is Sontag’s honesty about her own ambivalence and discomfort. Rather than producing an uncritical celebration of North Vietnam, she records the difficulty she experienced in genuinely connecting with the Vietnamese people and culture she encountered, and her awareness of the gap between her Western intellectual habits—irony, complexity, individualism, psychological interiority—and the earnest, collective, morally straightforward idiom of her hosts.
Much of the essay’s interest lies in this tension: Sontag examines her own expectations, her guilt as an American, her wish to admire what she sees, and her simultaneous resistance to the simplifications that political enthusiasm can demand. Over the course of the account she works toward a partial reconciliation, attempting to understand the Vietnamese on their own terms and to interrogate the limits of her own sensibility rather than measuring them solely against it. In this way the trip becomes as much a study of the observing Western intellectual as of the country observed.
Place in Sontag’s Work and Significance
Trip to Hanoi marks a phase in Sontag’s development in which her political engagement became explicit, complementing the aesthetic and cultural criticism for which she was already famous. It reflects the broader turn of many American intellectuals toward direct opposition to the Vietnam War during the late 1960s, and it stands as a notable document of that period’s mood among the Left.
The essay is often discussed in relation to Sontag’s characteristic themes: the ethics and limits of interpretation, the confrontation between different sensibilities, and the self-scrutiny of the writer. Because of its willingness to expose the author’s uncertainty rather than deliver confident political conclusions, it has been read both as a sincere act of solidarity and as a more complicated meditation on the encounter between a Western intellectual and a revolutionary society at war. Within her body of work it remains one of the principal examples of Sontag writing directly about politics and about her own position as an American witness abroad.
