Every page of her account of her trip, undertaken a few months after the North Vietnamese massacres in Hue, gives voice to her self-flagellating sense of guilt for being a wealthy citizen of USA. She loathes herself for being poisoned by capitalist society and its pleasures. A schizophrenic outlook emerges, because Sontag believes that she has found paradise in Hanoi. She forgives herself for the grievous sin of reaping benefits of her own society, which she hates. She is just a radical leftist weirdo, who would not survive 48 hours in the society which she idolizes.
