Martin Adán's La casa de cartón (1928) is one of the avant-garde Hispanic American texts that combine the lyric and narrative modes. This essay analyses the consequences of this mix in the construction of the narrator. Although one of the text's strategies is to diffuse, or 'de-sketch' the narrator's identity, one recognizes the staging of a persona characterized as a 'young poet', who criticizes the use of literary and metaphorical language as a reliable way of accessing reality.