Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are ad hoc networks that consist of tiny sensor nodes deployed in the sensed environment to monitor the natural phenomenon and send the monitored data to the base station for further processing. Due to the unfriendly deployment of the sensor nodes and their resource-constrained nature, the sensor nodes are subjected to frequent node failure. Detecting sensor node failures and recovering them is a major challenge in WSN. Due to the failure of the nodes in WSN, there exist various problems such as a change in the network topology, communication link failure, a disjoint partition of the network, and failure to transmit the data to the sink. Various authors have proposed various techniques to detect and recover from node failure in the WSN. In this paper, a comprehensive analysis of the various node failure and node recovery techniques has been carried out to highlight the advantages and limitations along with the open research challenges for addressing the failure of the nodes in an effective manner.