Styles of Radical Will

by Susan Sontag

The Vietnam that, before my trip to Hanoi, I supposed myself imaginatively connected with, proved when I was there to have lacked reality. During these last years, Vietnam has been stationed inside my consciousness as a quintessential image of the suffering and heroism of “the weak.” But it was really America “the strong” that obsessed me—the contours of American power, of American cruelty, of American self-righteousness. In order eventually to encounter what was there in Vietnam, I had to forget about America; even more ambitiously, to push against the boundaries of the overall Western sensibility from which my American one derives. But I always knew I hadn’t made more than a brief, amateurish foray into the Vietnamese reality. And anything really serious I’d gotten from my trip would return me to my starting point: the dilemmas of being an American, an unaffiliated radical American, an American writer.