66 pages • 2 hours read
Jasmine WargaA Rover's Story
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Grief and Loss as Part of Life
Though Resilience and his fellow devices are human-made constructs of synthetic material and computerized thought, the robots and humans of Warga’s world are more alike than they are different. In Chapter 26, when Resilience searches for the difference between living and non-living things, his research suggests “that Xander and Rania would be in one category, and Journey and [Resilience] would be in another” (86). That this finding disturbs him, however, only contributes further to his humanity. Rather than focusing on the line between humans and robots, the novel is interested in the processing of human emotions. In particular, Warga uses Resilience as a way to explore how we process grief and loss as part of life.
Encountering death for the first time is a major part of coming of age. In the novel, both Resilience and Sophie have to face the fact of mortality—Resilience through Courage and Sophie through Rania’s illness. When confronted with Courage’s blank state, Resilience experiences fear of his own mortality for the first time. He sees his own end through Courage’s blankness. It’s therefore on finding Courage that Resilience’s courage ironically falters; it’s when he finds Courage, the rover, that Resilience needs actual courage more than ever. The fact that life—for Resilience, represented by knowledge—can be permanently lost is initially overwhelming. Nonetheless, that loss is part of life. As Guardian observes, “You are not meant to last forever” (179).
Part of grieving and loss is accepting that The Pursuit of Knowledge never ends—there are always questions, and often, we will never find the answers to them. The novel acknowledges the complex emotions that unanswered questions can evoke. On the one hand, having perpetual questions is key to curiosity and wonder. Pursuing answers to questions is, often, a joyful task that brings meaning and purpose to people’s lives; it can change the world for the better. On the other hand, living with perpetual questions can be frightening. Fly astutely raises questions of what happens after life: “What does it mean to be gone? Is there only blankness? Or has [Courage] arrived at a new type of knowledge?” (286). Much as with Resilience’s mysterious whistle, the novel provides no answers. Sophie struggles similarly. When her mother is sick, her letters emphasize the unknown nature of the illness: “No one knows what it is yet” (209). Notably, the novel never names the illness at all, and the letters are structured in a way that implies (but does not confirm) Rania’s death, putting even the reader in a state of not knowing.
The Pursuit of Knowledge
The characters of A Rover’s Story are profoundly concerned with advancing the boundaries of human knowledge. The vastness of space evokes the vastness of what we don’t know, and Rania’s brushes with death, as told through Sophie’s letters, are a reminder that there is still more we don’t know beyond even that. Yet Resilience’s dedication to learning, as well as the other characters’ dedication to creating and supporting him, demonstrate the process of the pursuit of knowledge and its importance.
Advancing knowledge is a collaborative effort, not an individual pursuit. Rania is an important leader in Resilience’s creation. Yet her work would not have been possible without Xander and the other Hazmats (what Resilience calls humans). Rania’s work is also supported by her family. She depends on her mother and husband for childcare, and her daughter, Sophie, has to find the patience and grace to support her mother despite her mother’s frequent absences. When it is time for Resilience to land on Mars, Rania must also trust him to navigate and make decisions himself. Similarly, while Resilience is the main figure in the mission to Mars, his success depends on the support and aid of others. The rovers who came before him informed his own design. Rania, Xander, and the other scientists created him. He depends on his fellow robots once on Mars, drawing not only on what he learned from Journey in the lab but also on the insights of Fly and Guardian. As a whole, the novel shows how individuals must work together to learn more about the universe; teamwork is key to accomplishing the great feats necessary to push knowledge forward.
Regarding the importance of the pursuit of knowledge, the novel offers both concrete and more metaphysical justifications. In a concrete sense, the pursuit of knowledge allows for important human advances. Sophie, in a letter to Resilience, wonders when she is younger what exactly it means to make “world-changing discoveries”: “Are you going to change our world? Or are you going to change another world? What does it even mean to change the world? What about it needs to be changed?” (72). These questions may seem fair in the context of Resilience’s main quest, which is to gain knowledge about Mars, a distant planet. However, in a grim parallel, as Sophie’s mother gets sick, the human woman falls into the position that Resilience once was in—left in a state of not knowing and put through “lots of tests” (209), reliant on the knowledge of others. In this context, the importance of gaining knowledge becomes painfully clear. “No one knows what it is yet” (209), Sophie laments; the pursuit of knowledge, in a broad sense, is key to answering such questions and, as a result, changing the world.
In a more metaphysical sense, the novel frames the pursuit of knowledge as inherent to being alive. On first coming online, Resilience observes, “I awake to knowledge” (1). When he is brought back online after 17 years of being stranded on Mars, he remarks, “I am flooded with knowledge” (276). Part of what Resilience finds most distressing about Courage not coming online, in turn, is the loss of Courage’s knowledge. For Resilience, who is representative of the human condition, one’s knowledge is representative of one’s unique self: “What is the point of gathering all this information—all this new knowledge—if it just goes away someday? What happens to all my knowledge if it leaves my system? Where does it go?” (231). Resilience doesn’t want to obtain the evidence on Mars to become famous or secure a legacy. He wants to obtain it in order to live up to his creators’ hopes: “I am looking for something that will prove that I am a worthy rover” (245). He wants it in order to ensure his return to Earth, which, as Sophie finally makes him realize, is his home. That is, for Resilience, the pursuit of knowledge is core to who he is and aspires to be.
Balancing Emotion and Logic
The characters of A Rover’s Story have varying opinions on emotions and logic, feeding into the novel’s exploration of the intersection of these two forces. Emotions and logic have their own benefits and drawbacks; exercising them both is key to overcoming each respective force’s weaknesses. A key part of Resilience’s character arc depends on him learning this lesson, which feeds into the theme of balancing emotion and logic.
Neither emotion nor logic are entirely good or bad. In Chapter 13, Journey explains to Resilience that human emotions are bad because they lead to poor decisions. Unlike rovers, humans care too much, and “because of their attachments and their feelings, they do things that are dangerous” (44). Journey’s statement is neither entirely true nor false. Human emotions do lead to attachments, as Resilience observes through Rania’s phone calls home. On Mars, Resilience’s attachments will also influence him to make dangerous or questionable choices. However, emotions can also lead to acting with courage and taking valuable risks, which operating on logic alone may not enable. Ultimately, Journey’s closed-minded attitude toward emotions keeps her from understanding Resilience’s desire to do well on Mars and make the scientists proud. Perhaps accordingly, Journey is ultimately mistaken in her assumption that Resilience is the “backup robot.”
The figures of Rania and Xander in the lab show how both emotion and logic have their place even in the pursuit of knowledge, with Resilience eventually channeling their respective personalities in his quest. Resilience takes a particular liking to Rania for her logic and Xander for his emotions. Rania’s “elegantly written code” is key to making Resilience work in a literal sense (9). She’s also “usually faster than Xander when it comes to solving problems” (25). However, though Rania chides Xander for anthropomorphizing the robots, it’s Xander’s efforts that imbue Resilience with the emotions that guide the rover on his mission—the emotions that make Resilience resilient. The duality of emotion and logic plays out on Mars in the combination of Resilience’s wonder and curiosity with his ability to reach into his code for critical knowledge. Fly’s simplified version of their mission reflects this duality too: “Avoid dust and see stars” (124). That is, respect logic as much as possible while also indulging in the beauty that inspired this mission.
The balancing of emotion and logic culminates as Resilience struggles with experiencing failure, which he interprets as its own distinct emotion, and the subsequent existential dread of realizing his own mortality. On failing to bring Courage back online, Rellick struggles to move on. His companions support him in two ways, channeling both emotion and logic. Guardian maintains her calm, calling his attention back to the mission: “‘Resilience,’ Guardian says. ‘You need to refocus on your mission. There are many more things to be done. Ways to be useful. Do not let this one setback stop you from completing other duties’” (233). When this guidance alone is not enough, Fly sings. The motifs of language and music are both at work in this action, demonstrating the importance of emotional connections in coping with the fact of grief and loss as part of life.
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