question:  What is the role of the pirate ship story that Dunbar tells?
context: TO EACH HIS STAR by BRYCE WALTON "Nothing around those other suns but ashes and dried blood," old Dunbar told the space-wrecked, desperate men. After the wreck, the four of them had floated a while, floated and drifted together, four men in bulbous pressure suits like small individual rockets, held together by an awful pressing need for each other and by the "gravity-rope" beam. Dunbar, the oldest of the four, an old space-buster with a face wrinkled like a dried prune, burned by cosmic rays and the suns of worlds so far away they were scarcely credible, had taken command. Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line, taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where he was going. Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like strange seeds down the night winds of Venus. When the four of them had escaped from that prison colony on a sizzling hot asteroid rock in the Ronlwhyn system, that wasn't enough for Dunbar. no—Dunbar had to start talking about a place they could go where they'd never be apprehended, in a system no one else had ever heard of, where they could live like gods on a green soft world like the Earth had been a long time back. And Dunbar had spouted endlessly about a world of treasure they would find, if they would just follow old Dunbar. "You're still sure it's the sun up ahead ... that's the only one with life on it, Dunbar ... the only one we can live on?" "No life, boys, nothing," Dunbar laughed. A pirate ship and I was second in command, and we came through this sector.
output:  It helps to clarify what is true for the reader when the aliens find his body
options:  It proves that he knows where he's going and he had the right choice all along  It is a fantastic story meant to keep the crew entertained while floating in space  It points to who will rescue his body when he arrives at the planet  It helps to clarify what is true for the reader when the aliens find his body