I Want to Believe

“I Want to Believe” is the narrator’s shorthand for a hope that persists without dispelling doubt. Invoked while he weighs the hazards surrounding Linda May’s plan to build a home, the phrase captures the tension between wanting the dream to succeed and recognizing how precarious its path may be.

Meaning in Context

The narrator recalls that he had been considering Linda May’s dream for three years and had doubted it before. In the face of those doubts, he says he mostly shared the mantra of Fox Mulder on The X-Files: “I Want to Believe.” The phrase names a chosen orientation toward the dream, not a claim that its practical risks have disappeared.

Those risks are concrete: Linda May and Gary Fallon are about to travel to Campbellsville, Kentucky, for five months of ten-hour night shifts at an Amazon warehouse. Linda May intends to earn money for construction on remote land exposed to summer heat, armed drug mules, flash floods, and rattlesnakes. Set against that list, the expression holds hope and apprehension in the same frame.

Hope Under Strain

The phrase’s force comes from the gap between belief and certainty. The narrator wants to imagine Linda May stepping into a southwestern Eden, yet his worries return when he is alone with his thoughts. His mantra does not settle whether the plan is wise; it marks his effort to remain emotionally invested while the dangers remain visible.

Linda May’s own account gives that hope an immediate, practical dimension. After receiving the narrator’s map and photographs of her land and its surroundings, she writes from Amazon that she opens the images often and dreams of being there. She says the prospect of fifteen more weeks before she is free helps her endure a job she hates. The dream is therefore not abstract optimism: the land represents the future she is working toward, while the warehouse job is a difficult interval she hopes to leave behind.

Narrative Function

“I Want to Believe” also signals the narrator’s position in the account. He is neither simply endorsing Linda May’s plan nor dismissing it: his admiration for the imagined home coexists with questions about the remoteness of the land and the dangers there. The expression makes that unresolved stance legible, framing hope as something maintained in the presence of evidence that gives reason for concern.