Identifying Dina's Issues in Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere - Essay Example

Identity in the Short Story Drinking Coffee Elsewhere In the short story written by ZZ Packer d Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, the protagonist discusses her lack of understanding about her own identity and the way in which her socio-economic status affected her ability to understand her place in the world. Packer writes about not understanding how to live in the world in which she had been thrust. Her life had been difficult in ways that most of her peers at Yale did not relate. Her only truly social human interaction exacerbated her conflicted identity because she was unsure of how she felt about this new friend.

She copes through displacing her mental location from her physical location, being someone else who exists outside of her own circumstance. Packer explores the experience of being eighteen and trying to understand ones own role in the world while navigating a foreign culture that emerges when leaving home and entering a university. The world of an individual changes when they leave home and enter a university setting. Most young people have lived with their family in a specific type of neighborhood for most of their lives.

Even people who have moved frequently trend to gravitate towards neighborhoods that are familiar. Therefore, children have a specific perspective before they leave their family for college which is challenged by the new culture that confronts them within a university setting. For Packer, this university setting was Yale where from the beginning she felt challenged for the protective measures of distrust she had developed in her life. Her orientation involved games of trust which did not suit her perspective on others in the world which was automatically mistaken for a part of her racial identity.

However, it was not her racial identity that defined her nature, but her experiences in a lower socio-economic life that had worked against her to take her sense of belonging and her trust in others to treat her as part of the greater community. She relates the story of how she frequented grocery stores outside of her neighborhood because she was uncomfortable in the one nearest her home. She also defines herself as a reader, an intellectual who was not understood for her desires to read by others in her neighborhood (Packer 5).

Therefore, she was always seeking sanctuary outside of her physical sphere, her own identity not in step with the culture in which she had been born. It was not that she felt she was better than others in her community, but that she recognized the pain of her life over the social inclusion of living in that community. Packer tells the story of meeting Heidi in a detached lack of sentimentality through which she is able to express her confusion about this association. She and Heidi become friends because Heidi pursues the relationship, offering an open heart to one who was perpetually closed.

There is only a whisper of attraction suggested and when the possibility of opening up to a stronger relationship is made possible through the event of Heidi coming ‘out’ as a lesbian, Packer slams the door shut, retreating to her closed emotional space (Packer 7). At the end, she longs for Heidi, but it is still unclear whether or not she is primarily attracted to her in friendship or in romantic love. Somehow, it matters little as her real need is for that of a human connection within which she could live, even if still vague, in a semblance of her true identity.

This is the gift that Heidi seemed to have given to her in their time at Yale. Packer tells her story in the same detached sentiment that defined her lack of a true understanding of her own identity. Her relationship with Heidi allowed her to open a piece of her social identity, but was slammed shut when that identity was challenged by Heidi’s revelations of her own sexual identity. While she was displaced in the new culture she was confronted with through the Yale experience, in truth she had spent her life displaced within a socio-economic status that put her at odds with her struggle to define her intellectualism.

In a world that was more confrontational and threatening because survival was far more difficult, she felt more secure in calmer neighborhoods who at least had the appearance of sanctuary. Packer relates the story without creating the usual desperate search for identity and without a haughty expression of triumph for having found herself. The tale is specific about its lack of true resolution, her life existing before and continuing to exist after while her dreams still exist in a setting that is outside of reality.

Works Cited Packer, ZZ. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. The New Yorker. 19 June 2000. Web. 27 March 2011.