I'm mostly assured that Fyodor wanted to write a essay about the modern world, but he might have noticed it sounded too presumptuous, so he wrote a story in the format of a novel better exercising his point of individual, society and the detachment between the the individual and the latter.
You see, by being too thoughtful and rational of the world surrounding him the main character becomes a professional asshole in the art of bitterness and hatred. From where I see it the entire point of the story is to tell what becomes of certain individuals in the modern world, coming on life by their own special way, that they become too much of an emotional cancer for doing anything considered "normal" with anyone:
I have the memory of an ant so...
