This study draws thematic and narratological parallels between Lord Jim and The Lifted Veil, suggesting that Joseph Conrad's and George Eliot's philosophies and views on art were much closer than has hitherto been thought. In her uncharacteristic foray into gothic fiction, Eliot seems to have anticipated many of the modernist techniques usually associated with Conrad, such as the loss of narrative authority and spatiotemporal coherence on which realist conventions were based. This essay also analyzes Conrad's and Eliot's use of the veil motif to address ontological and epistemological problems raised by idealist philosophy such as the interdependence of object and subject and the impossibility of directly apprehending the world. The anticipated epiphanies resulting from lifting the veil in Lord Jim and The Lifted Veil are finally indistinguishable from psychological projection since they give access to merely another level of illusion rather than to any underlying truth.

这项研究得出了吉姆勋爵和《揭幕》之间的主题和叙事学相似之处，这表明约瑟夫·康拉德（Joseph Conrad）和乔治·埃利奥特（George Eliot）的哲学和艺术观比迄今所想的要近得多。艾略特（Eliot）在非哥特式的哥特式冒险中似乎已经预见到了通常与康拉德（Conrad）相关的许多现代主义技巧，例如叙事权威的丧失和现实主义惯例所基于的时空连贯性。本文还分析了康拉德和艾略特对面纱主题的使用，以解决唯心主义哲学提出的本体论和认识论问题，例如客体和主体的相互依存以及直接理解世界的可能性。揭开吉姆勋爵和《抬起的面纱》中的面纱而产生的预期顿悟 最终，它们与心理预测是无法区分的，因为它们仅提供了另一种幻觉，而不是任何内在的真理。