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?""