A Rover's Story

Resilience is the point-of-view character and protagonist of A Rover’s Story. In the novel, the word “resilience” is defined by the sixth grader who chooses the name for the rover as follows:

[Resilience is] the power or ability to return to the original form after being bent, compressed, or stretched. It can also mean elasticity. There is another definition in which resilience means the ability to recover easily from adversity. The dictionary also says resilience can mean buoyancy, which is the ability to float (14-15).

All of these capacities are important literally and metaphorically to Resilience in the course of his journey. In the early chapters, for example, Resilience worries that there is something wrong with his programming because he is different from all the other robots he encounters. He tries to be more like Journey, believing that mimicking her logic-based thinking will make him a better rover. As Resilience learns more about emotions, though, and especially once he finally launches on his mission to Mars, Resilience comes to rely on his “original form,” that is, on his true self. Journey is correct: Resilience is “a strange rover” (59). However, that is also one of his greatest strengths.