Hemingway at his best is not a maker of metaphors. He resists the notion that anything can overtly be compared to anything else. While his images almost always function on two levels—the literal and the figurative—Hemingway refuses to help his reader bridge the gap between the two realms by in any way suggesting that his language might be two-dimensional. The pervasive sense that an overwhelming symbolic logic lurks just beneath the level of the literal is precisely the sense of the uncanny which Hemingway at once wishes to exploit and deny. From the perspective of rhetorical decorum, the "uncanny" acquires a stylistic as well as a psychological definition, since the tenor of every vehicle is just "that which ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light." Once Hemingway begins to take his metaphors as metaphors, his writing collapses the tension between the literal and the figurative which had lent it such an air of suspicious calm. The novels from 1940 on can be read as a debate over the uses of self-consciously metaphoric language. At the heart of this debate is the metaphor of the hand.

The "'thing of the hand'" haunts For Whom the Bell Tolls, where it refers to reading the future from one's palm. Like most of Hemingway's heroes, Robert Jordan spends his time "'looking into the future in English.'" At first he is open to Anselmo's question, "'Can you read in the palm of the hand?'"

"No," Robert Jordan said and he dipped another cup of wine.

"But if thou canst I wish thee would read in the palm of my hand and tell me what is going to pass in the next three days."

Anselmo recommends Pilar, she reads the palm, and, correctly foreseeing Robert's doom, refuses to speak of what she sees. While its ending has effectively been given away, the novel settles into a debate over whether a man trulycarries his fortune in his hand. This debate expands to cover all forms of divination and culminates in Chapter 19. To the question "'Do you believe in the possibility of a man seeing ahead what is to happen to him?'" Robert replies that such forebodings are "'evil visions,'" projections of what one fears, and therefore need not be accepted. (pp. 312-13)

Fortune-telling is a business of the hand. So is suicide. Once Robert Jordan has rehearsed his family history, it becomes imperative for him to renounce as "crap" the business about "Pilar and the hand." Robert's father … has killed himself with a hand gun…. [The] gun had been handed on to the son. Robert threw his Smith and Wesson into the deepest lake he could find…. In disposing of the gun, Robert has a premonition that he will repeat his father's act: "he climbed out on a rock and leaned over and saw his face in the still water, and saw himself holding the gun." It is especially this "evil vision" against which all Robert's resistance to divination is meant to defend. And the novel upholds him in his resolve. Lying wounded at the end, Robert refuses "to do that business that my father did." On the contrary: Robert's last act is to touch "the palm of his hand against the pine needles where he lay." He uses his hand to extend his life. The novel literalizes the metaphor of the hand as fortune in order to reject it.

Writing is also a business of the hand. As we watch Robert sketching the bridge, "glad at last to have the problem in hand," we encounter the sense of relief Hemingway felt in 1939 in finally sitting down to write the novel. (pp. 313-14)

The Old Man and the Sea marks the last complete remission of the debility which had afflicted Hemingway since 1941: writer's cramp. Santiago worries about nothing so much as the "treachery" of a hand. "If he cramps again let the line cut him off." Amputation is a melodramatic extension here of a deeper threat: that this man who brings up things from the depths is losing control of "the working part of his hand." Santiago talks to anything that will listen, but above all to his hands. The struggle in the book is less against the fish than against his hands. "There are three things that are brothers: the fish and my two hands." Santiago and his body stand outside this brotherhood in which the hands cooperate with the very opponent they are meant to master…. Santiago's body has become a function of his hands and he keeps it alive in the hope that they will again return to his control. (p. 316)

Santiago does succeed in landing his fish. He brings the hidden to light with his hands. The book is at once about and evidence of such a triumph. Gregory Hemingway suggests, however, that it was precisely the imminence of failure during the "short period" of The Old Man which made the book a success:

the humility and empathy for man's fate, which the Nobel Prize Committee remarked on and which it interpreted as "growth," was the result of his seeing what it was "truly" like to be without his genius—and the knowledge of what it was like for the rest of the people all of the time and to be uncushioned from the world by the intellectual and material rewards of genius.

So Hemingway's sense of his failing powers gave his book power. Such a vision is necessarily short-lived, depending as it does upon having come to terms with the end of something. What was ending was not potency but creativity. Writing was no longer a response to experience but to the problems of writing itself. This is Hemingway's late great theme, the burden of A Moveable Feast. If Santiago's story is a lament for a dying self, Hemingway's last book pays tribute to a dead one. Like all elegies, it purchases power by burying its speaker along with its subject. Then "I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it." Now my prophetic sense of an ending has been fulfilled: "In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed." In these days, the implication follows, the springs have dried up; the spring never comes. A Moveable Feast is so gracefully parasitic on past creation that it could have been called, as had been "The Circus Animals' Desertion," "On the Lack of a Theme."

Hemingway began to make metaphors as his writing became aware of its impending demise. The Old Man is a book full of similes ("The sail … looked like the flag of permanent defeat"), of things he had previously refused to make with a pen. Metaphors extend human consciousness out into the universe of things. They make a home of ("humanize") the world. This had always been Hemingway's task, the infinite expansion of territory which could be included in "the good place." What had made his writing powerful was the ever-present but unexpressed threat to this project which forced it to remain implicit and which lent to any metaphor the air of a wishful and unconvincing compromise. Reading The Old Man, where even the stars have become "distant friends," Hemingway must have sensed that his project was at once perfected and finished.

The metaphor of the hand was above all one which Hemingway could not afford to leave on the level of the literal. Had he done so, he might have turned it much earlier against himself. The work from 1940 on can be read as a holding action in which Hemingway attempted to convince himself that the "hand of fortune" was just a metaphor. This demanded his acceptance of a metaphorical style which would make explicit the distinction between the literal and the figurative. It could be said that Hemingway increasingly resorts to figurative language in order to defend the province of the literal. (pp. 317-19)