Robinson Crusoe teaches Friday is to call him "master." This occurs almost immediately, right after Crusoe gives this native man the name "Friday" without offering him any input into what he should be called, erasing in a stroke his former Indigenous identity. He then says,

I likewise taught him to say Master.

Crusoe's assumption of the right to name Friday and insistence that Friday call him by a title rather than a name sets up the power dynamic of the relationship from the start. This is a classic example of what the philosopher Nietzsche called the "fall" into language. By this, he meant that we internalize words and their connotations before we have any context to judge what they mean. Friday calls Crusoe "master" before he understands the meaning of the word or the abject position that it places him in vis-à-vis another human being.

Crusoe also interprets Friday's overflow of gratitude at Crusoe having helped save him from cannibalism as Friday pledging him eternal servitude. Just as we never learn Friday's real name or if it had more dignity than being named for a day of the week, we never learn what Friday meant by his grateful gestures. As when native people did not believe they were selling their land permanently to Europeans when they allowed use of it in return for a few trinkets, so Friday might well have been offering thanks and repayment without meaning to become Crusoe's slave. In any case, from the start, his being taught to call Crusoe "master" establishes an unsettling hierarchy between the two men that reflects Crusoe's unquestioning assumption of white superiority.