Brady argues that the trilogy is seriously flawed because the proem of Australia Felix introduces a mode of tragedy that cannot be sustained in a work that proceeds from an emperical and rational perspective. Such realism is disturbed by the "pressure towards some transcendant explanation" of Richard's life. The conflict between these two modes creates an ambivalence that influences critics to choose one or the other mode as a unifying explanation of the whole. Brady concludes that such a critical approach obscures a "monument to a painful state of dividedness".