I kind of think both are true. I will remember Winston as great thinker who is extremely aware his world. And the tragedy or death of him is death of his awareness. His ability to think. In all the protagonist I have seen in tragedies, he is peculiar. While reviewing one another writer's work, Orwell said
> ‘... was a bad writer, and some inner trouble, sharpening his sensitiveness, nearly made him into a good one; his discontent healed itself, and he reverted to type. It is worth pausing to wonder in just what form the thing is happening to oneself.’
In the first act, the writing was so cold and I could not feel any connection to Winston. Even, when getting intimate with Julia, he is thinking,
> In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
I don't know when I started to feel things and empathize with him so much. When you think about circumstances and how he feels, he is cold as it gets, always scheming.
And in the most hopeful time of his life, he say these
> ‘We are the dead,’ he said.
> ‘We’re not dead yet,’ said Julia prosaically.
> ‘Not physically. Six months, a year – five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.’
But, when you think of an inner life, he has one of the richest and rare ones. We empathize with that, and when crystal ball falls, it was the most tragic thing I have experienced. I think, genius of Orwell is that he made the character and the idea indistinguishable.