Analysis Of ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

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ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a beautifully written short story about a college student named Dina. The story is told in a first person perspective and revolves around her personal struggles at Yale. In Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Packer uses flashbacks and vivid imagery to show how Dina is not in tune with herself physically or emotionally. This results in her inability to cope with her life in the rich white world of Yale as an African American woman or how to cope with life when traumatic events happen. Even in the beginning of the story Packer uses the first person narrative and vivid imagery to show how Dina closers herself off as well as her dissatisfaction with the white world she lives in. Dina says: “Then a freshman counselor made everyone play Trust. The idea was that if you had the faith to fall backward and wait for four scrawny former high …show more content…

Instead, she just shuts down emotions instead with excuses like the world goes on without those people. Dina also states how she said Heidi’s mother cancer “wasn 't a big deal” further showing how Dina does not cope and is so dissociative from real human emotion that she just will close off traumatic events like death in the family. Packer also shows Dina’s intelligence through packers use of more college level language in her dialogue. Even the character of Dr Raeburn deconstructs Dina stating: “You construct stories about yourself and dish them out.”(Packer 8) Throughout the story Dina is just constructing a story about herself, one that from the outside looks like a denial of her individuality. She constructs the story about the boy to hide her struggle with sexuality. She constructs the story about her dad’s part in the death of her mother. Stories that prevent Dina from actually coping with the trauma or hard events in her life which causes her to alienate everyone from her

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